PERMIT me to reply to your correspondent Mr. W. J. Stillman, on the “Formation of Language” (NATURE, March 26, p. 491). The interesting fact he records of the spontaneous invention and use of child-names for objects is not unknown to philologists. The phenomenon has been previously noticed, among others, by Miss Watson, of Boston, and Dr. E. R. Hun, of Albany, U.S.A.; by Archdeacon Farrar, in the case of Indian children left by themselves for days together in Canadian villages; and by M. Taine, in his work “De l'Intelligence.” Numerous examples of children's language are given by Dr. Horatio Hale (philologist to the U.S. Wilkes Exploring Expedition), who has made a special study of the spontaneous development of roots among children the basis of his remarkable theory of the origin of linguistic stocks. Full details will be found in a paper on the “Development of Language,” read before the Canadian Institute of Toronto, April 1888, and in an address on the “Origin of Languages and the Antiquity of Speaking Man,” in the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Buffalo, 1886, vol. xxxv. The occurrence has been often noticed in the families of philologists—the most noteworthy instance being that of the young nephew of the well-known Sinologist Dr. George von Gablentz. This boy, before he learned his mother-tongue, called things by names of his own invention. The constant elements were the consonants, the vowels being varied, and employed as they were deeper or higher to denote greatness or smallness. The root for round objects was m-m; a watch, plate, and the moon was mem, a large round dish or table, mum, and the stars mim mim mim; an ordinary chair was lakail, a great arm-chair lukull, and a little doll's chair likill. A distinguished Accadian, Chinese, and Semitic scholar, the Rev. C. J. Ball, makes no secret of the fact that, between the ages of six and eight, he and his young brother had names of their own devising—perfectly arbitrary monosyllables and dissyllables for several of the small tools and toys they valued most. Mary Howitt relates in her autobiography (edited by her daughters) that the silent sadness of the Quaker home circle extended to the nursemaids, and that in consequence of this the eldest child, her sister Anna, did not learn to talk until she was four years old. Long after they could talk, “being left chiefly to converse together, our ignorance of the true appellations for many ordinary sentiments and actions compelled us to coin and use words of our own invention. To sneeze was to us both okis-kow, the sound which one of our parents must have made in sneezing.” Here we get a true onomatopaeia, as in the monosyllable mea, employed by one American child for “cat”; in another child's vocabulary the extraordinary trisyllable shindikik designated that animal. The association of ideas and extension of meaning are often very suggestive—viz. migno migno = water, wash, bath; waia waiar = black, darkness, Negro. As in the case of the name for water, bhumboo, cited by Mr. Stillman, the vocables are often of two syllables, rarely of three. It is interesting to note the continued use of the little boy's own name for water as a means of identifying the acquired Italian aqua for the same object, as frequently happens with adults struggling to express themselves in a foreign tongue. Reduplication seems also to characterize these “child languages” like those of some savage tribes, and plurals are formed by repetition. The syntax, Dr. Hale remarks, resembles that of deaf-mutes and gesture language. If left to themselves there seems no reason why children with this aptitude should not develop a vocabulary at least as extensive as that of Dr. Farrar's three peasants, “who conversed for a long while without employing more than one hundred words.” Many cases of “child language,” no doubt, have passed away unrecorded. Soon after the children mix much with adults, the special vocabulary begins to die out. It is possible that the use of such spontaneously developed root-words might be prolonged among the children of the poorer classes, so often cared for by children but little older than themselves. The creches of our large towns might afford further evidence of abnormal developments of this apparently inherent inventive linguistic faculty.
Read full abstract
Oct 1, 2020
Congcong Ma + 5
Open Access